Fanseeth: Clades, Class, Career, and Culture

This document is a bit of a miscellany of some of the elements of the Fanseeth that contribute to their culture.

Clades

Clades represent groups of people who live in the same habitat on a moon or the same area of one habitat on a station. They are the towns or (more rarely) the cities of the Fanseeth.

Miners and pilots in particular will frequently have jobs that take them away from their clades for stints of time, but they will return to their clades between their jobs (e.g., a miner goes out to a moon for some significant period of time, then has a significant period of time off).

Clades are usually pretty mixed groups. There will usually be a small segment of each of the four predominant cultures in every clade, though how much that matters will change.

For example: A vordur politician living in a clade of mostly miners may be looked down upon by other vordur, but they still have the political connections. They still will likely send their child to a more vordur-centric group for education and friendship-building.

Class Mobility

Class mobility technically exists among the Fanseeth, and there are no rules that prevent, for example, a hakal miner from being elected to the position of Warden.

But it isn’t that simple.

The four predominant cultures of the Fanseeth are strongly tied to the socioeconomic class of the group. They represent who you “rub elbows” with. Which parties you get invited to. Which schools you attend.

Even if you can change your economic situation, it’s hard to develop the connections of someone who was born in that group. Someone who loses their money still has a network of connections and will often make significant sacrifices to ensure that their children maintain those friendships. It can take generations to fully move between two different groups.

There are significant cultural forces in play that make this movement difficult—in both directions. It’s hard to learn everything you need to know about mining on the job if you didn’t grow up around it. It is difficult to know the ins-and-outs of a political system if you weren’t raised among people who are fairly political.

But it absolutely can happen.

Theoretically.

Careers and Other Jobs

As mentioned in the section on class mobility, there’s nothing really that prevents someone from one group from doing jobs commonly associated with one of the other groups, and it even happens. A bondi family that is hard on their luck ends up with one of their children becoming resource harvesters. A vordur child has a large inheritance coming eventually and wants to spend some time to “find themselves” so spends it doing odd jobs aboard ships and then goes back and writes a book about the experience.

In general, however, you see people of the cultural groups in the jobs that are associated with the groups.

So usually a pilot will be a member of the Kappi. But that kappi pilot likely has a family that includes younger members who are doing odd jobs to learn the ropes or working as mechanics aboard ships or for different clades.

A high level bureaucrat is probably a member of the Bondi, but their family (and indeed, their own history) likely includes everything from janitorial work to selling tickets for liners to tour the moons.

These “lower level” jobs are also where you find the most mobility between the groups. It is very hard to become a pilot without the correct set of connections and experiences, but working on a moon liner in some role is a relatively straightforward proposition.

In general, however:

Vordur will do a lot of managerial jobs at different levels of prestige. They will work as marketing directors for corporations, entrepreneurs finding new creative ways to invest money, and other such things. When younger it is pretty common to see them apprenticing to higher level vordur and doing a lot of odd jobs for them.

Kappi do a lot of jobs associated with ships and shipping. Everything from logistical planning to cleaning ships to mechanic work to piloting.

Hakal are often associated with mining, but they’ll also do a lot of the work related to resource extraction and preparation. Extracting metal from the ores or purifying gasses to be used, and maintaining the equipment used for these tasks.

Bondi fill in the gaps inside of the clades. They are farmers, craftsmen, programmers, and frequently low-level executives at companies.